Fifth Avenue, 5 A. M.

by Sam Wasson

  Audrey, though, drank very little. The alcohol would soften her focus, and focus is what she needed to keep up with Blake. Wearing a beehive hairdo piled high and streaked blond with peroxide, she worked as fast as she could, digesting the director’s notes with startling fluency. Edwards would assign her a move, line, or a gesture, and she would apply it right away, in a single take. Between setups, while Blake disappeared for his twenty-minute miracle naps or health food lunches, she could be seen reminiscing to a cluster of attentive players. Audrey was viewed by some as distant—in these cases, probably just taking a moment to herself before the scene—but as countless have testified, the generosity she showed to her costars was bottomless. “Everybody loved Audrey,” recalls Miriam Nelson. “She was so sweet and unassuming and nice to everybody. Some stars go to their dressing rooms between takes, but she didn’t. I remember a group of us had gathered around her while they were relighting the scene, and she told us about the blitz in London. And she also told us that her mother always wanted her to have an extra pair of white gloves in case the gloves she was wearing got dirty. I remember that.”

  “Everything you have read, heard, or wished to be true about Audrey Hepburn,” said Richard Shepherd, “doesn’t come close to how wonderful she was. There’s not a human being on earth that was kinder, more gentle, more caring, more giving, brighter, and more modest than Audrey. She was just an extraordinary, extraordinary person. Everyone should know that.”

  When she wasn’t on camera, Audrey might be spotted in her little elevated on-set trailer, watching the production from above. “It was like a little box two feet up in the air,” remembers Kip King. “It had a bed and a few cabinets. I talked to her standing at the door of the dressing room, two feet below her. I was doing stand-up at the time and was trying to get her to laugh. She would smile and was always very kind. I think if she was Snow White, I was one of the dwarves. You know what I’m saying? There were human beings and there was Audrey Hepburn.” Joyce Meadows would also hang around beneath the trailer. “When Blake yelled cut,” she said, “the second A.D. walked over to the tall ladder beside me and yelled up, ‘Audrey! Get your butt down here! You’re in the next scene!’ And there she was, watching the whole thing from her trailer. ‘Ahhhhh!’ she screamed. ‘That’s right. That’s me, isn’t it?’ I looked up and here comes this woman who looked like a toothpick dressed in black coming down the ladder to join the crowd. One thing about Audrey: she had none of that star stuff. You didn’t have to say ‘Miss Hepburn.’ And Blake was just as sweet. At the very end of the shoot, when I was all through, I walked out the stage door, and Blake rushed up and said, ‘Joyce Meadows.’ I turned around and he said, ‘Thank you for making it a beautiful party.’ I said, ‘Thank you, sir.’ I was surprised he even knew my name.”

  “The party scene was such a smash,” said McKenzie, “Blake and my husband [screenwriter Tom Waldman] decided it might be a good idea to do a whole movie like that. That’s how the movie The Party came about.”

  Here in the party scene was an opulent sweep of visual humor. All the surprises, gags, stunts, and reversals that had beckoned to Edwards from the silent films he adored were splayed out in kooky munificence, advancing one after the next like toys on a conveyor belt. But unlike the slapstick of Edwards’s masters, Mack Sennett and Leo McCarey (directors of The Keystone Cops and Laurel and Hardy), Blake’s revisionist spin had a satirical edge. Each punch line—from the eye patch, to the phone in the suitcase, to the couple in the shower—was pointedly drawn from Holly’s central theme; that the way things appear is not always the way things are. For as Holly’s agent, O. J. Berman says, “She’s a phony. But she’s a real phony.” More than simply jokes, Edwards’s party gags implicate all those present in the charade, gently mocking everyone too hip, drunk, or fashionably blasé to notice what is made obvious to Paul Varjak—that these nuts may be glamorous, but they don’t have a clue. It’s the cosmopolitan façade cut down to size, and in Edwards’s comedic terms, it’s sophisticated slapstick.

  No one is less conscious of it than Holly Golightly, who lights a hat on fire, but notices nothing. Nor does she notice the empty frivolity of the life she leads, her true feelings about coupledom, or the man who wants so badly to love her. These are the thematic cornerstones of Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s; Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by contrast, takes as its central preoccupation Holly’s never-ending search for belonging. That’s what Tiffany’s is to her, and significantly, she never gets inside. But that is most certainly not the case with Blake Edwards’s picture. In the movie, the director’s personal interest in phoniness forms the basis of this Holly’s story, which, because it is a romantic comedy, will resolve in love. But before it can end happily, all of the many lies, betrayals, and masks (literal and figurative) must be stripped away. So how to end it? What if all the glamour and society élan of the picture’s first half came down to, say, a dark and rainy alley? Or if the image of the cage with which Edwards began the party scene was somehow…inverted…

  THE END

  But Axelrod’s ending called for nothing of the sort. What’s more, the scene wasn’t really that dramatic. It didn’t crescendo. It didn’t sweep you up. It just ended:

  EXT. STREET—(DAY)

  Paul stands watching the departing car. The rain has stopped now and patches of blue are beginning to show between the clouds. At the corner the limousine stops for a light. Suddenly the door opens and Holly jumps out. She is running back toward him across the wet sidewalk. In a moment they are in each other’s arms. Then she pulls away.

  HOLLY

  Come on, darling. We’ve got to find Cat…

  Together they dash up the block and into an alley in the direction Cat had gone.

  HOLLY

  (Calling)

  You cat! Where are you? Cat! Cat! Cat!

  (To Paul)

  We have to find him…I thought we just met by the river one day…that we were both independents…but I was wrong…we do belong to each other. He was mine! Here Cat, Cat, Cat! Where are you?

  Then they see him, sitting quietly on the top of a garbage can. She runs to him and gathers him in her arms.

  HOLLY

  (To Paul, after a moment)

  Oh, darling…

  (But there are no words for it)

  PAUL

  That’s okay.

  They walk in silence for a moment, Holly carrying the cat.

  HOLLY

  (In a small voice)

  Darling?

  PAUL

  Yeah?

  HOLLY

  Do you think Sam would be a nice name for a cat?

  As they continue to walk up the street—

  FADE OUT

  THE END

  That was it. But Blake couldn’t hear the music swell, he couldn’t see Paul and Holly pushed to the brink of their passions and beliefs, and without that eleventh-hour twist, the whole mechanism would just sputter to a halt. What it needed was some kind of imperative, the feeling of high tension followed by a crucial snap. Holly’s mask ought to be ripped off her face.

  All right, Blake thought, this is a scene about Holly’s change of heart. She was once an independent, a free spirit, and now she wants to belong. The business of naming the cat comes to represent that transformation, sure, but this isn’t Lassie; it’s a love story between a man and a woman, so why play the climactic scene between her and an animal? Play it instead between the two of them, and that line about belonging, put it in Paul’s mouth.

  PAUL

  You know what’s wrong with you, Miss Whoever-you-are? You’re chicken, you’ve got no guts. You’re afraid to stick out your chin and say, “Okay, life’s a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that’s the only chance anybody’s got for real happiness.” You call yourself a free spirit, a “wild thing,” and you’re terrified somebody’s gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it’s not b
ounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It’s wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.

  Now there’s drama. Now there’s a question in the air. Will she go with him or won’t she?

  The new pages were dated September 14, 1960, written six weeks after Axelrod’s final draft. In the big speech, the scene’s centerpiece, Blake recapitulated the image of the cage, which he featured in the first shot of the party sequence. He added the rain, changed the limousine to a taxi, and they shot it in December of 1960.

  But they also shot the original ending—George’s ending. That way, in postproduction, Blake would be able to see which one worked better. The final decision was his. And anyway, George was back in New York. “Blake shot both endings,” says Patricia Snell, “but he picked the one he wanted. There wasn’t much George could do about it during the production, but when it was done, he put his three cents in.” What happened to the footage of Axelrod’s ending—the ending that survives only in print—is a secret kept by the Paramount vaults, if it’s kept anywhere at all. Perhaps it’s gone for good. Perhaps not. Maybe it’s mislabeled thirty feet under ground, and by some archival magic will turn up accidentally in years to come. But it’s not likely. The cutting room floor is a graveyard.

  THE CAT IN THE ALLEY

  “As a woman,” film critic Judith Crist said in 2009, “if I could chop down my reactions, I would say that Breakfast at Tiffany’s was a progressive step in the depiction of women in the movies, perhaps unintended by Axelrod and Edwards. The woman in me really likes Audrey Hepburn because she is successful at what she’s doing, she’s sort of in charge of herself, and is a realist beyond being so cute and attractive. That appeal—a woman’s appeal—comes from the very basic idea of the gamine, and not just the gamine’s physical being, but the idea of her cleverness. Marilyn didn’t have that, but Audrey did. As a gamine, shrewdness was available to her. So she’s a call girl, but we let her have it. There’s even something very appealing about it. We won’t admit it, but don’t we, really, all secretly admire her for it? Because she gets away with it? Because she’s so imperious, and at the same time is slightly, shall we say, immoral?

  “If I could chop down my reactions one step further,” Crist continued, “that’s the added pleasure for me as a critic, and it’s at the heart of why Breakfast at Tiffany’s is perhaps one of Audrey Hepburn’s classier achievements. Her previous performances are beautifully embodied, but marked by intelligence, breeding, and middle-class grace—all qualities already familiar to us in Audrey. But not Holly Golightly. She was an impostor. That’s why she’s a multilayered character—Audrey’s first. Not only that, but—and here’s the woman in me again—a multilayered woman who isn’t punished for her transgressions. When Bette Davis played the bad girl, she paid for it. That was the thirties-forties morality. Then there were things in the fifties like Love Me or Leave Me with Doris Day, which was the beginning of redemptive “wrongdoing,” but its excuse was biography. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was different. It was one of the earliest pictures to ask us to be sympathetic toward a slightly immoral young woman. Movies were beginning to say that if you were imperfect, you didn’t have to be punished. But what’s clever about the way they ended Breakfast at Tiffany’s—this is, of course, my own feeling—is that you don’t get the sense that the two of them will last forever. About George Peppard’s character, I remember thinking, ‘Well, he’s not long for it. Just because you’re going to give the cat a name doesn’t mean that the cat isn’t going to go back to the alley.’ You see what I mean?”

  THE RAINCOAT

  “Edith did the raincoat Audrey wears at the end of the picture,” Patricia Snell recalled. “I was on the set the day they shot that scene, and Audrey knew that I had loved the raincoat and wanted to give it to me, but Edith had made it so difficult for Audrey to even get the raincoat that I didn’t find out until years later when Blake said, ‘Do you realize what Audrey went through to get you that raincoat?’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t.’ You see, Edith Head didn’t want anyone giving costumes away. They made about six of them, you know, because you never know what’s going to happen on a set. But she finally got it and wrapped it in a box and, boy, I was so thrilled to get it. I love it.”

  THE KISS

  Two dressing rooms were assembled for Audrey, especially for the final sequence—one for taking off her wet clothes, the other for putting on dry ones. They were labeled “Wet Hepburn” and “Dry Hepburn.” When it came time for the kiss, Blake held out for eight takes, each one straining Peppard’s neck more than the last. To give the camera the best view of the leading lady, the actor had to tilt his face just so, and the awkward angle, he claimed, threatened his look of rapture. (And the cat, meanwhile—a very, very wet cat—was stinking up the joint. That didn’t make things any easier.) But they did it again (and again) with Audrey ducking into “Wet” and emerging from “Dry,” and at long last, with the warmish studio rain pouring down around him, Blake Edwards had the last shot he wanted. High-angled and wide, his camera tilted down on Paul and Holly ensorcelled in a kiss. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was now a love story. Jurow and Shepherd—their fretting about star and subject officially behind them—had their old-fashioned happy ending in the can. Axelrod had his high comedy, Blake his lowbrow elegance, and Audrey Hepburn, who said she couldn’t do it, had done it.

  7

  LOVING IT

  1961

  ONE OF BENNETT CERF’S DINNER PARTIES

  In the days leading up to Tiffany’s release, Joan and George Axelrod ran into Capote at one of Bennett Cerf’s dinner parties in New York. As Joan told it,

  Truman was there and curious about how George felt about it [the movie]. George said, “I’m very happy with it, but I don’t know how to break this to you….”

  Truman said, “What? What?”

  “They’re not going to stick with the title.”

  Truman said, “What?”

  “They’re not going to stick with the title.”

  Truman said, “What? They’re not going to use the title…?”

  “I pleaded and begged but, Truman, there’s nothing I can do about it. They’re calling it Follow That Blonde.”

  Truman fell for it hook, line, and sinker. George caught him at his own game. The moment Truman got it, he turned bright red. I’ve never seen him be so embarrassed, because this was something he thought he was beyond. Nobody could play a joke on him, nobody could lead him down that sort of garden path. He was totally furious.

  He always liked George, but he was never really friendly with him after that and I think it had to do with that story.

  ONE OF BILLY WILDER’S DINNER PARTIES

  Meanwhile, George and Blake were riding a few postproduction bumps of their own. Though he swallowed Blake’s ending without too much bitterness (it was sentimental, yes, but he agreed it was probably wise to give ’em what they paid for), Axelrod objected to the liberties Edwards took with the party scene. As the film’s director, it was Blake’s call, but with the question of authorship at stake and reputations on the line, it was going to take more than prerogatives to ease Axelrod’s mind. “What Blake did with the cocktail party upset George a lot,” said Patricia Snell. “Blake just took it and ran with it and I’m not sure it’s what George had in mind. It wasn’t his.”

  Neither, for that matter, were Mickey Rooney’s scenes. They incensed George. “Each time he [Rooney] appeared I said, ‘Jesus, Blake, can’t you see that it fucks up the picture?’ He said, ‘We need comedy in this, and Mickey’s character’s funny.’ But Mickey’s character is a) not funny in that film, and b) he has nothing whatsoever to do with the goddamn story. I got Audrey to agree to re-shoot the last scene, which was the only thing she was in with Rooney, so I could cut out all the Rooney stuff. However, Blake kept it in.”

  “From there on,” adds Snell, “the relationship between Blake and George was difficult. They never really [pause]…
we were socially their friends, we would go to their parties, and they would come to ours, but Blake and George just never quite connected after that. We would see them every Friday night at the Wilders’ dinner parties, and on the surface they remained friendly but, you know, that’s the game people play in Hollywood.” Had Axelrod been a producer on the picture, he could have kept a handle on his interests, but it was too late for that. All he could do now was smolder in silence.